Astronomy leads us to an unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required… - Arno Allan Penzias

The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally reflects purpose.

Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order.

After a painful but largely successful struggle with courses and qualifying exams, I began my thesis work under Professor Townes. I was given the task of building a maser amplifier in a radio-astronomy experiment of my choosing; the equipment-building went better than the observations. In 1961, with my PhD thesis complete, I went in search of a temporary job at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. Their unique facilities made it an ideal place to finish the observations I had begun during my thesis work. “Why not take a permanent job? You can always quit,” was the advice of Rudi Kompfner, then Director of the Radio Research Laboratory. I took his advice, and remained a Bell Labs employee for the next thirty seven years. Since the large horn antenna I had planned to use for radio-astronomy was still engaged in the ECHO satellite project for which it was originally constructed, I looked for something interesting to do with a smaller fixed antenna. The project I hit upon was a search for line emission from the then still undetected interstellar OH molecule. While the first detection of this molecule was made by another group, I learned quite a bit from the experience.